No More Fast Food for the Mind.
Divisiveness. Uncivil discourse. Ill-mannered criticisms. Anger. Frustration. Pointing of fingers. Picking of sides. This concoction of negative emotions and ideas are precisely what we should avoid, instead of advance.
I once told Hugh that media consumption can feel a lot like ‘feeding our minds Big Macs’. And our minds, like our bodies, deserve the best quality cuisine we can find — should we want it to live at 100.
If our intake of information is reduced to bias-confirming headlines, memes, and opinions from individuals with large followings posing as thought-leaders, we do a great disservice to our minds. Indeed, it is this very content that fuels this antipathy we’re dealing with in the first place.
Now, this post isn’t meant to be cynical, but rather to illustrate a point. By ‘feeding’ our minds this ‘fast-food of information’ we form rudimentary opinions and perspectives on affairs that demand meticulous understanding.
A healthy body is not maintained by consuming foods without observing nutritional information. A healthy body is not maintained without understanding our own nutritional deficiencies. A health body requires preparation our own meals, shopping for our own groceries, and counting of our own calories/carbs/etc. It cannot happen simply by eating what’s in front of us — such as the fast food joints up the street.
This is precisely how we should treat our minds, too. Let’s deconstruct the content we come across. Let’s seek out information, instead of simply taking in what appears on our news feeds. Let’s turn to good books, if the world is asking us to pick sides. Let’s understand the deficiencies of our own innate perspectives and seek out knowledge to helps us grow. Let’s remember that the forming of opinion and shaping of perspective should not be simple and fast, but rather challenging and slow.
Let’s take out the fast food and intake the good stuff.
Hey, but by all means, please continue to enjoy the funny memes. They are pretty awesome. ;)
-Tikh
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Living at 100 is a movement. A movement of people and ideas in pursuit of their best. Atikh Bana and Hugh Ingalls have started a podcast that comes to you live on Facebook every Wednesday and now a blog to go along with it. The podcast is 30 minutes of discussion, taking inspiration from the world’s best thinkers and developing our own principles and insights. Our plan is to deliver all of this in a digestible format. More to come!